Off went the cat on his holidays this morning. I always feel a little bad sending him away ... but it's better than the alternatives (especially over Christmas when there's not really anyone around to feed him). He's beginning to work out what the cat box means, which is a shame, he used to bound into it with glee and now he needs a shove.

My face got better, incidentally, though it was still itchy last night while I was trying to play quake ... leading to a couple of times of dieing in game coz I just had to rub my face so stopped moving. Never felt quite in control while playing, which was a bit bizarre - J suggests it was maybe just coz I didn't know the new maps, which is likely true.

More Civ at lunchtime, too - tried going all out for conquest ... I conquered the Russians, I was working on the Greeks. And I ran out of money, totally. Like -15gold/turn on 0% science and no gold. So that went a bit pear-shaped. I clearly need to put more thought into that after Christmas. There's a new patch out too, which tweaks some gameplay, so not a lot of point putting thought in till I play with that installed.

Worked a bit more on my Quake3 log analyser too - it has now lost its unhealthy obsession with particular players (if you want to clear out a hash set it to 'undef' don't set it to a reference to an empty hash as subsequent edits will alter the empty hash and screw things up). So it works as is. Next up - I want to handle suicides better. If you kill yourself it should count as only a death and the weapon shouldn't be added into the tallies for generating favourite weapon stats. Though I may pull out the ones that are by 'MOD_SUICIDE' as I think that's the kamikaze.

And more reading. I looked for (and failed to find) plot synopses of the GRRM books, so I'm sticking to reading my way through - if you know where I can find relatively detailed plot summaries, do let me know, we need to both have read the fourth book in three weeks and it's a fairly big book.

Mmm, didn't know about that. Maybe I should write something that ranks the weapons people use and then see what pops out of the data before I make a decision on what to do about suicides - kamikaze may be labelled differently (it's either that or manually inspect the whole logfile looking for what weapon types there are).

Speaking of reading, are you still interested in participating in clubbook? We're trying to figure out who is still around now that the holidays are (almost) past. We're also brainstorming ways to spark more involved discussions. I know you were intereseted and active this last summer. Is there something that would appeal to you or make the books or discussions more interesting for you? Please, let us know!

Yes, still interested - the last couple of months you've (we've, I guess) picked books that I've previously looked at in bookshops/the library and decided I didn't want to read, so I've let it pass me by for now.